Beyond the negator: Structural competition and contextual influence in Korean suppletive negation

This paper investigates suppletive negation in Korean—verbs like eps- ‘not exist’ and molu- ‘not know’ that inherently encode negative meaning. While Short-form negation (SFN) and Long-form negation (LFN) typically introduce the marker an ‘not,’ these suppletive predicates lack any overt negator yet still exhibit key syntactic and semantic parallels to SFN. Drawing on newly elicited data involving double negation, negative polarity licensing, and negative polar questions (NPQs), we argue that suppletive negation is structurally integrated at the verb level, thus competing with SFN for the same morphological slot. Despite this competition, we show that pragmatically driven contexts—such as a speaker’s surprise or contradiction of prior assumption—can override the default morphological restriction, enabling suppletive negation to pattern like SFN in NPQs. In doing so, this paper refines prior analyses (Chung 2007; Park and Dubinsky 2019) and highlights the importance of morphological fusion and discourse factors in shaping how negation is realized. Our findings offer broader insights into Korean negation and contribute to cross-linguistic theories of negation by illustrating how structural and pragmatic pressures converge to produce distinctive negative forms.